1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to a server and a simultaneous access control method thereof, and more particularly, to a server and a simultaneous access control method thereof in which efficient network traffic can be provided by distributing access to the plurality of clients.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, content transmission systems include a single server to provide content, and a plurality of clients to receive content. Specifically, content transmission systems include clients, Content Management System (CMS) servers to manage meta information relating to provided content, Content Delivery System (CDS) servers to manage information relating to downloading content and relating to whether downloading is completed, and Content Delivery Network (CDN) content servers to store content. The clients, which may be set top boxes, communicate with the CDS servers and CDN content servers to download and display content.
Each of the plurality of clients periodically receives a content download list from the CDS server, accesses the CDN content server, and downloads content. Additionally, each of the plurality of clients displays the downloaded content. In this situation, if the plurality of clients simultaneously request access, a load may result in the CDN content server.
Accordingly, when the network bandwidth of the server increases in order to solve the problem, the content maintenance cost may also increase. The content maintenance cost is a value obtained by adding the network cost to the storage cost. The network cost is computed by multiplying the average of the maximum access amount for a day by the traffic unit cost.
Similarly, even if a separate download server is provided for the plurality of clients to download content, the content maintenance cost required to establish the separate download server may also increase.
Furthermore, when the plurality of clients is divided into groups and download content at different times, each client has a different network state. Accordingly, if the time difference for each group is not great, the access amount for a day may increase due to different times for each group, and thus it is difficult to efficiently manage the network traffic.